This invention relates generally to mail pieces for direct-mail marketing and more particularly to systems and methods for processing multi-page mail pieces.
Direct-mail marketing, which entails the mailing of marketing material (often but not necessarily in letter format) directly to postal recipients, has become a significant form of marketing. Direct mail campaigns often involve thousands, or even millions, of mailings. In order to cost-effectively produce large volume mailings, the printing and processing of the mail pieces are automated. This is typically accomplished by printing the desired information on one or more webs of paper continuously fed through high speed printers and then wound into rolls. The roll or rolls of printed paper are then transferred to a processing system. The printed paper is drawn as one or more webs through the processing system, which cuts, handles, folds and/or otherwise processes the webs to produce the mail pieces.
Multi-page mail pieces are common in the direct mail industry. Existing processing systems are adept at handling multi-page mail pieces having an even number of pages, but multi-page mail pieces with an odd number of pages are more difficult to produce in a cost-efficient manner with conventional processing systems. For instance, while a four-page mail piece would be relatively easy to produce, a five-page mail piece would require either a blank sixth page (leading to waste and increased material cost) or having the fifth page inserted separately (resulting to increased processing time and labor costs).
It is also highly desirable to provide personalization to large volume mail pieces. In the direct mail industry, “personalization” refers to the inclusion on individual mail pieces of information that is unique to the intended recipient of each mail piece. Such personalized information can include the recipient's name, address, account number, gender, age, etc. Personalization presents additional difficulty in multi-page mail pieces because the personalized information from recipient-to-recipient is likely to involve differing numbers of characters, meaning that the page makeup can vary for each mail piece. In other words, if the first page of a multi-page mail piece contains personalized information, then the page break at the end of page one will not necessarily be the same for each mail piece. Accordingly, the page makeup for each subsequent page will need to be adjusted as well. Thus, for each mail piece, the first page needs to be correlated with the subsequent pages that correspond to the first page (i.e., have the proper page makeup and pagination to go along with the personalized first page).